Here are some info/quotes from the Miller-McCune article A Future of Less by David Villano that I thought might provoke thought and discussion as we start our VS Circle season:
The US only makes up 5 percent of the world's population but it:
- burns nearly 25 percent of the world's energy
- is the highest consumer of all traded commodities (corn, copper and rubber)
- eats three times more meat than the rest of the world on average
- uses about one-third of the world's paper.
- produces 30 percent of the world's waste, 25 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and throws out 96 billion pounds of edible food each year.
"John de Graff, co-author of the book and PBS documentary Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, is national coordinator of 'Take Back Your Time,' a Seattle-based advocacy group that promotes flexible work options and employee benefits like guaranteed vacation time and maternity leave. De Graff, who's lobbying for a bill that will make it easier for part-time workers to receive health insurance and other employee benefits, notes that countries with the most progressive worker-benefit laws — Iceland, Denmark and the Netherlands — also rank the highest in surveys of happiness and satisfaction. (The U.S. ranks 13th, just behind the Philippines.) 'I think it's pretty clear that a higher quality of life — as measured by far more than just income — will actually reduce the desire to spend and consume,' de Graff says."
"Maniates a professor at Allegheny College is making the case that the battle against climate change (and the related challenges of resource depletion and environmental degradation) will be won or lost not through government edict but when people choose lifestyles that lead to real reductions in how much they spend, acquire, drive and, in general, consume. And those reductions, he insists, must be substantive, not superficial symbols like recycling newspapers or switching to low-watt light bulbs. He's trying to shift the public discourse away from these baby steps of conservation and toward what is, to many, the unthinkable: steep, absolute declines in per-capita consumption of oil, food, minerals, timber products, fresh water and other finite resources."
"Real change — steep declines in per-capita consumption of energy and raw materials — will occur when Americans are allowed to choose lifestyles that initiate low-consumption patterns of behavior. Invariably, those lifestyles are the consequence of trading a degree of work (and pay) for time — a tradeoff that Maniates and others say plenty of Americans are willing to make. The equation is simple: Less work = less money = less consumption. Maniates says government must make it easier for workers to make those choices: 'We need to allow people to do the right thing — policy measures that allow them to follow their noses to happiness and satisfaction.'"
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